This past week, while on Thanksgiving hiatus between traveling and raiding my parents' fridge, I managed to break a tradition of the most sacred sort...at least according to WE TV. Behold, I have committed an unforgivable trespass by wearing my wedding ring...BEFORE my wedding! (Shocked gasps.)
We purchased our rings (bling!) the day before Thanksgiving at Northeastern Fine Jewelry. Our friend Joseph over there hooked us up with two of the most perfect rings—mine, appropriately glittery, and RM's, appropriately looking like it was sheared straight off a lead pipe.
When we got back to the car, the temptation was too much. Well, we're already technically married...and the rings are safer on our fingers than tucked away in a drawer...So with glee, we placed them on each other's fingers. I let out a really loud giggle, which elicited laughs from the people getting out of the car next to us.
And of course, the first thing my mother said to me when she saw it was, "you're not supposed to be wearing it yet!!!"
But Let me tell you, it feels damn good to be wearing a wedding ring. It's like those friendship necklaces we used to split with our friends when we were kids, except way bling-ier. I'm one half of a championship team. I don't feel that I need to save the act of wearing a ring because tons of brides before me have done so. I also don't feel like my wedding is going to be the event horizon of my life. It is just another reason to get my party on and celebrate life! To heck with tradition!!!
But as I was dancing gleefully around the dying embers of wedding tradition, the simultaneous demise of another tradition in my life was really killing my buzz.
For every single Christmas Eve of my life (and I ain't as much of a spring chicken as I used to be), I've gathered with a gaggle of extended family at Auntie Ray's house to eat lobster spaghetti, listen to family lore, and wait excitedly for a drunken Santa Claus riding atop a fire truck to drive past the house in East Boston.
That evening seems always to take on an air of magic and mystery, if for no other reason than we were all together and happy for another year. Cares just melted away for the entire night! We kids would tear around the house in our excitement, but settle in at the "kids" table at the first whiff of lobster spaghetti. The sounds and smells of Auntie's have come to define Christmas for us. Even the inebriated avatar of St. Nick had an air of fantasy about him...at least I thought so, because even at my ripe old age, I am still the first (and sometimes only) cousin to tear out of the house and down to the street corner at the first sound of a siren.
But this year, Auntie is not hosting Christmas Eve. It will be the first year in my life that Christmas will come and go without it. On that note, it will be the first Christmas Eve of my mother's life, all my uncles lives, and all my cousins' lives without it as well. I had always believed with certainty that one day I'd bring my own children to Auntie's house on Christmas Eve. That I won't sits heavy on my heart, and it's not something I can just let go of...it has been woven so deeply into my life!
Yet, times must and do change, and we all have to accept it. So this year, we will let it be the start of another new and wonderful tradition! The memories of Christmas Eve at Auntie's house that are burned into hundreds of photographs are also burned in to my soul, and I can revisit them every Christmas in my heart, no matter where I am.
Here are a few of those photos, for old times' sake:
The Cousins Club
Andrew threatens the family with a butter knife
The last Christmas Eve at Auntie's (Dec 2008)**Editor's note: Incorrect assumptions were made re: the reason Christmas Eve will not be at Auntie's this year. Bad communication is to blame. Sorry!!!
